Although the Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867) produced a variety of works, from portraits to history painting, he is nowadays most famous for his sensuous female nudes. This work from 1806, The Valpinçon Bather, is considered to be a precursor to many of Ingres’s later nudes, most notably his Turkish Bath from 1862.
More than a century later, the idealistic, serene depiction of this voluptuous yet chaste girl in an exotic context, inspired Man Ray to create his well-known photograph, Le violon d’Ingres (yama-bato.tumblr.com/image/26205144425). Typical for the surrealist movement that he belonged to, Man Ray’s 1924 recreation of Ingres’s work plays with the meaning of words and the associations and imagination of the spectator. He photographed his favorite model and muse, Kiki de Montparnasse, in a setting and pose that refers to Ingres’s enchanting painting. By adding the f-holes to her naked back, he transformed her body into a violin. This seems to explain its title, Ingres’s Violin, sufficiently, but we will see that that it is more than just the mix of a painting and an instrument.
Ingres’s great passion besides his art was playing the violin. As a violinist, he was not without merit and he maintained musical contacts with, among others, Paganini and Liszt. This pastime would eventually lead to a general expression in French: ‘violon d’Ingres’, meaning a skill other than that at which one excels, a hobby.
Man Ray’s photograph can thus be seen as a visualization of this French expression. And it can’t be a coincidence that Man Ray, though viewed as one of the most famous photographers ever, always persevered that he was a painter and sculptor and that his photography was just something he did on the side, in other words a ‘violon d’Ingres’.
(text: Maarten Levendig and Pauline Dorhout)
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